Appalachian Apple hunter who rescued 1k ‘lost’ varieties (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Appalachian Apple hunter who rescued 1k ‘lost’ varieties (2021)

atlasobscura.com

277 pointsmooreds87 comments

Kind of related: in former Eastern Germany they bred all kinds of new Pear varieties.

Pears are a little more finicky than apples and the fruit bruise more easily. Furthermore a lot of the varieties will go bad really quickly, so you basically have to eat them from the tree.

Because of those reasons there are just one or two varieties available in stores and there is not a lot of commercial interest in Pears. With the end of the GDR, also came the end of Pear breeding and there are barely any new breeds in the last 30 years.

To end on an Apple related note: my favorite GDR breed is the „Schweizer Orange“, „Swiss Orange“. Which is so ironic because there was no access to Switzerland nor good Oranges.

Serendipitous seeing this mentioned here after my father very recently mentioned how much he missed the variety of pears that he could get when he went on komandirovkas to the GDR.

I don't understand "komandirovkas" in this context. Was he a Warsaw pact or Soviet intelligence agent working in the GDR? Or was he West German but traveled to East Germany for one reason or another?

No much simpler than that. On-site work effectively, but more centrally-driven and controlled.

I hope some of those trees are still around somewhere waiting for someone to find them.

Ah yeah, there are still cultivars of the old breeds, but the problem is that without new breeds being created, we are not combatting the challenges of climate change and diseases changing.

As you seem to know something about this, what's an apple/pear hybrid like? I assume they do hybridise. How about pear/quince? That should be an interesting one.

They don't hybridise as far as I know, or don't give anything long-lived.

An interesting hybrid though is x Sorbopyrus, a cross between a pear and sorb tree.

Never heard of it so for others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipova

Can't cross with an apple but can with a whitebeam, I wouldn't have believed it. Amazing, thanks.

There are some apple-pear hybrids that produce fruit. Development work seems ongoing in Germany. Unfortunately for me as (mostly) an English speaker, most of the papers describing it are in German. Here's a summary of an abstract in English, though: https://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=US2014.... If you search for the primary author plus some keywords (Thilo Fischer Apfel Birne) you can find articles that give more details.

I'm guessing the Sorbopyrus you are describing is the Shipova: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipova. It's a surprisingly old hybrid. I've got one growing, but haven't gotten any fruit yet. Have you eaten it?

I have never eaten it, but it's at the top of my list of trees to grow once I have enough space for it.

Not that knowledgeable. We just wanted to plant a pear tree when our kid was born. The tree seller was very chatty and knowledgeable.

You also need to plant pears in pairs in order for them to pollinate each other. There are tables with which varieties go well with each other.

If you can, try comice. A diva to culture, but the fruit is fantastic.

Pears are not the easiest fruit to culture and in some areas is a doomed project from the start. --Don't-- buy trees in the supermarket without a sanitary tag. Go to a professional. Fireblight is a real pain

apple and pear don't hybridize. They don't even can be grafted one in the other. The tissues are rejected. There are round species of pears naturally shaped as an apple but they are not "pears" (common pears) neither apples. Are from Japan and are called nashis or sand pears. Tasty and crunchy, very good in salads

Pear and quince can hybridize producing a fruit called Pyronia (= Pyrus x Cydonia). Is not better than any of the parents, so it remains basically unknown and unavailable.

Quince is able to hybridize with apples and pears.

https://cornusmas.eu/catalogue/intergeneric-hybrids

has some information about some interesting mixes (and he sends out great plants if you are in Europe).

Palms also form fascinating hybrids and there is an active community of people around the world doing this and sharing information.

If anyone interested I stumbled on this https://www.agroforestry.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/site-files... "Rosaceae family intergeneric hybrids" which covers a number including those mentioned here, plus hawthorn, medlar and rowan mashups

> Swiss Orange“. Which is so ironic because there was no access to Switzerland nor good Oranges.

Perhaps this is what made it desirable.

It’s a pretty good Apple as well. Very crisp and more fresh-sour after harvest and becomes more sweet when stored for a few weeks.

And I stand corrected, it actually is Swiss and was created in 1935: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_Orangenapfel

More information here for those of us who are teutonically challenged:

https://pomiferous.com/applebyname/schweitzer-orangenapfel-i...

Fascinating! I went to look for more information about this, and didn't find anything at all, but did find this charming and interesting piece about German pear varieties from long before the descent of the Iron Curtain:

https://cider-review.com/2021/09/20/pyrus-a-personal-voyage/

Interesting, thanks for the information especially on Eastern Germany. I'm not super familiar with many apple/pear varieties but worked as quality control for a pear packaging factory for a summer. The fruit are basically picked hard and processed/packaged the same day. The most common defects are punctures from the short stems and then maybe bruising. I think most defective pears are then used for canning or similar products.

They do ripen really quick and turn from hard green to yellow/brown in a few days. A perfect pear is so good..

I recently caught an apple-centric episode of 'Gastropod' and definitely recommend it. [1]

I like podcasts that have transcripts, and invite you to this moment where a few layers were added to my understanding of well known American figure 'Johnny Appleseed'[2]:

> TWILLEY: Johnny would get a mush of seeds and apple cores thrown out by a cider mill, and he would stick it in a dugout canoe, and tie that to another canoe and then float down the Ohio River to find a promising new patch of land.

> POLLAN: So like a real estate developer, he would make a kind of judgment as to where the next wave of settlement was likely to be. He’d buy or squat on a piece of land and he’d cultivate it and plant his apple trees and they would be ready when the settlers got there. And he would sell them for a couple pennies apiece.

[1]: https://gastropod.com/transcript-the-big-apple-episode/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed

I kind of like this version better than the altruistic fantasy. It’s a capitalism-driven win-win for Johnny and the settlers.

> I kind of like this version better than the altruistic fantasy.

Same, although to be fair, in this day and age the altruistic version is the more realistic one; it's a lot easier to guerrilla garden some fruit trees than it is to run a commercial nursery. Which is why most of the people who run small independent nurseries do it as a second career, and don't start until their 60s or so.

I also like podcasts with transcripts for when there are little segments I'd like to share with people. Sometimes they aren't the tagged segments, when available, but rather just a few lines in the middle.

Here's a podcast (w/transcript) about a collection of 120 old apple varieties in Massachusetts. https://awaytogarden.com/historic-apples-get-a-new-start-wit...

I have some trees from this place, as well as trees from 'Century Farms' - another meticulously kept apple and pear orchard archive.

Their tasting and usage notes on heirloom apples is worth a read. Learning how to take care of these trees has been a rewarding journey so far, their status can be so tenuous as you learn about the impacts of cedar tree rust, fire blight, and dozens of bacteria out to quickly ruin the trees!

https://www.centuryfarmorchards.com/descripts/osadescripts.h...

Used to walk a neighborhood near where we used to live near downtown. Go down a side street, at the end was a hayfield and a pond! In the middle of town.

And by the pond, an apple tree. With apples the size of cannonballs. Big as your head. Somebody would stack the ones that fell into tripods. It was surreal.

Anyway the place is developed now, the pond gone, the apple tree just a memory.

There is a strain of Golden Reinette that makes enormous apples, very tasty and great to make applesauce from. A bit on the sour side for many people but I love them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Reinette

That link says they're small. Hm.

Yes, they typically are. But there are certain variations that are really large, 15 to 20 cm diameter I've had (and no less tasty for their size, which is pretty rare). It's like a four person meal in one apple :)

They aren't all that popular because they bruise easily and aren't very pretty, dry skin, not glossy, dull colors, mostly yellow, dark green and brown. But I really like them.

I'm here to shout out about russets. Russetting is when the apple skin becomes like sandpaper. It typically becomes "rejected" fruit by shops, its seen as a no-no. But this ignores that russet apples exist as a sub-species, and are enjoyed by British people as an accompaniment to cheese. They are often very fragrent, and can have Nashi-like texture in the flesh.

I find it very odd it's universally regarded as an abnormality, when quite a lot of food speciation is this kind of divergence from the main path.

They're basically unavailable in Australia. I suspect if it occurs in fruit trees here it's rejected at farm gate, and if it occurs in import stocks the quarantine process rejects them.

Sitting by my bed is a copy of Michael Pollan's book "The botany of desire" he discusses Johny Appleseed in depth well worth the read.

Here's a nice Wyoming PBS piece on rescuing Wyomingian varieties: https://youtu.be/KZyD74vNdcc

See also “NC Tomato Man”: https://www.craiglehoullier.com/

Ironically, you will never find the best-tasting apples in your local grocery store. The tastiest apples are often smaller, brown or dark skin, not the big red 'juicy' apples the uninformed consumer thinks are the best. Viz. the Red "Delicious", whose flavor was bred out in favor of color and appearance. It is now insipid and flavorless.

In the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, the humble-looking Cox Orange is sweet as candy, with a hint of pear. You can only get it from local suppliers.

I heard the same thing about the American fig tree being basically candy compared to what we’ve got today.

It explains why carollers wanted figgy pudding so badly.

It’s the case of pretty much every grown food product. As a comment above it comes down to the incentives / optimisations of a grocery store.

In this case I think the American fig fell victim to disease more than optimization. But perhaps those are related too.

Disease is definitely a good point, some varieties have disappeared or severely contracted in range due to diseases and pests.

I’ll have to read up if the fig was a monoculture like bananas and therefore disease is kind of a consequence of what you’re pointing out.

> Ironically, you will never find the best-tasting apples in your local grocery store.

I'm not sure it's "ironic". I think it is a case of "you get what you optimize for".

Grocery stores optimize for:

* cost

* transportability

* shelf life

* appearance

And all for good reason! That's what makes money.

Doesn't matter if you have the best tasting apple in the world if shipping it on a truck destroys 90% of them and you can't sell the others before they go off.

And for chains don’t forget uniformity / repeatability.

There can be local variations but the chain usually wants a baseline for staples.

To be fair, to someone who was not born in the US and grew up eating apples from u-pick orchards, grocery store apples in CA have an awful apparence and shelf life and way too sugary taste, but this is likely a case of people buying what they are used to :)

There are u-pick orchards and farmers markets in California too.

Any thoughts on the Arkansas black?

All "black" apples and red flesh apples are a little acidic. Arkansas black (is not really black) improves after storing it for some months. Not so good to eat directly from the tree.

There are apples to eat from the tree and apples to store for winter. Both groups are desirable to have.

"Bred out" is a bit of a misnomer here. Apples varieties are propagated clonally through grafting. However, each new cloned tree originates from a single twig of a previous tree, and that twig originates from a single cell of the donor tree. Since cell division is not a perfect process, point mutations can accumulate over the generations from this process. In the case of Red Delicious, selections of point mutations (known as "sports") for storage life, color, and conical shape have resulted in the uninspiring, insipid thing we call a Red Delicious apple.

I have a tree of the original Delicious apple, which was a seedling found in an orchard near Sumner, Iowa, not far from where I live in NE Iowa. Preservationists have propagated this tree for minimal mutation. It is a slightly larger apple than commercial Red Delicious, ripens green with red blush, very firm, sweet with mild acidity, and moderate storage potential. Not my favorite apple of the 30 or so in my orchard, but one well worth growing.

Where you grow an apple also matters a great deal. Cox Orange Pippen may be great in Nova Scotia, which is not unlike it's Northern England home range, but it's a crappy apple in the mid-South, and can't be ripened reliably at all where I live.

> Not my favorite apple of the 30 or so in my orchard

Great answers throughout this thread. But this comment raises the obvious question: then which one is your favorite?

(my answer is usually Wickson Crab: https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/crab-apples/wickson-c...)

Depends of course on the use to which I'm putting the apple. If I had to reduce to a single variety in the orchard, I'd probably grow Liberty (not an heirloom, but rather a university-bred disease resistant variety created in the 1950s). Great eating fresh off the tree (if, like me, you like a tart, but not overly tannic, crisp eater), makes great dried apples, and decent unfermented juice. I would choose Honeycrisp (an even younger variety) over Liberty, if it weren't so damned hard to grow well. For keepers, I'd go with Black Oxford. For pies, it's hard to beat Beacon or Charlamoff (which is known by at least a dozen different names that are all somehow or other derived from Charlemagne, or Carolingian). I also like Calville Blanc for pies.

We're seeing a similar "optimization" on the internet. In this case it's information that's being optimized.

We're getting information that's less useful and nourishing, more clickbaity, pandering and addictive.

We could say that the internet is turning Red Delicious.

I actually bought a box of Cox Orange online from this orchard in VT. They were good, but the descriptions are always better.

https://www.scottfarmvermont.com/coxs-orange-pippin

Salt Spring Island, BC also seems to have a big heirloom apple thing going on, for any Van folks. (ex: I bought a couple of trees from this orchard https://www.saltspringapplecompany.com/)

They're only good until December. They don't keep, so beware of how old the apple is.

Cox Orange is a mythical cultivar. In part because the marketing but yep, is known as royalty. Sadly is known also to pick any fungus disease in the list. There are probably best new varieties. As a rule, the better taste a variety, the faster it spoils (unless you cheat).

Cox's Orange Pippin is indeed a great apple (and perhaps more importantly, a parent to a huge number of delicious and more tractable varieties), but it's hardly brown or dark - it looks like a textbook apple to me:

https://pomiferous.com/applebyname/coxs-orange-pippin-id-213...

And careful with "your local" anything on the internet - in the UK, in season, every single supermarket in the country has Coxes.

At long as there are wild, native apples growing somewhere, would that be enough genetic diversity to recreate similar varieties to anything that's lost?

Probably, but whether the particular combinations occurred again would be a more complicated matter. They don't breed true, so every new tree is pretty much a random experiment.

(a given variety is propagated by cutting and grafting)

Tom Brown Is on a Mission to Restore Appalachia's Rare and Lost Apples (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31457804 - May 2022 (18 comments)

7k varieties of apples and the 18 you need to know about (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29761351 - Jan 2022 (60 comments)

New variety of apple discovered by Wiltshire runner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25236672 - Nov 2020 (37 comments)

Pioneer-era apple types thought extinct found in US West - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22963226 - April 2020 (54 comments)

Lost Apple Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918261 - April 2020 (5 comments)

Documenting every apple variety in North America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20324355 - July 2019 (5 comments)

Also related (i.e. about apples -computer):

Apple Rankings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33639206 - Nov 2022 (462 comments)

The best apples for apple pie - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32966751 - Sept 2022 (60 comments)

Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28032226 - Aug 2021 (250 comments)

The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26055724 - Feb 2021 (84 comments)

Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977622 - Jan 2020 (48 comments)

Cosmic Crisp Apple Launch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20481026 - July 2019 (97 comments)

The Curse of the Honeycrisp Apple - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18415216 - Nov 2018 (96 comments)

7,000 varieties of apples and the 18 you actually need to know about - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16511886 - March 2018 (5 comments)

250 varieties of apple on one tree (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274944 - Sept 2017 (4 comments)

How we got apples that taste delicious (2015) [audio] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14527798 - June 2017 (18 comments)

The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14349964 - May 2017 (169 comments)

The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8300619 - Sept 2014 (142 comments)

Did I miss any? I used some search tricks to find these so it would be interestined if there are others.

I stumbled on this fine gentleman, while writing an article about a type of apple. His work is legend.

So, what is your favorite apple variety?

The one I'm currently liking is the King David.

That would need to add a month time axis.

My favorite apple for January is Perpetu "Everest", a crab apple that is small, hard and edible only in the strict sense, but oh, the birds that it attracts in the middle of the winter... Is unique in that sense. Unless the other apple trees, It keeps the fruits from Dec until March when the birds need it most. In your climate the mileage may vary.

For eating, Mingan, Golden or Rubinette are very tasty if picked in their moment, but my favorite apple is any resistant to the most diseases possible. This means a thick skin.

Although I appreciate the work folks like Tom Brown do, the notion that he has actually rescued 1000 varieties is a bit of a stretch. An apple variety is only really rescued when it has found a home in commerce and some significant consumer base wants it. Otherwise it's just on life support in a museum, and maybe in a few home orchardists' little collections of trees - it's perpetuation still hanging by a thread. In particular, trees grafted, as Brown's are, onto dwarf roootstock, sometimes mutiple varieties per tree, and maintained by an 80 year old retiree, could all be gone again in a decade or two, even if his records are meticulous. Dwarf apple trees don't live long, and a single ice storm or hurricane could kill hundreds of varieties in a single pass.

This is not to dis Tom's work, only to say, the actual rescue is very tenuous.

What you're describing sounds more like "revive" or "sustain". Interesting and important next steps, for sure. Saving a variety from imminent destruction is still a "rescue", though.

That's a fair and good correction. My only point is that they are still extremely vulnerable to extinction, unless there is demand for them in the market.

Many fruit collectors like Tom also make their collection available to other collectors.

> Although I appreciate the work folks like Tom Brown do, the notion that he has actually rescued 1000 varieties is a bit of a stretch. An apple variety is only really rescued when it has found a home in commerce and some significant consumer base wants it.

This was a great article about someone putting in a lot of work to collect and sustain old apple varieties. I didn’t expect to come into the comments and find people gatekeeping the concept of rescuing old apple varieties, especially not on the basis of a lack of consumer demand. He has made these available to others who want them, per the article.

Come on, this guy rescued varieties from extinction. He’s not on a mission to restore their popularity among the general public. Heirloom varieties are fun and rare and unique. Let’s enjoy and appreciate this for what it is.

I think their point is that apple seeds don’t grow true to their parent, so every single sprout from a seed is essentially a new variety, and they are continually created and lost -- the genetic line is not extinct, these are all the same plant. Capturing a large collection of palatable apples is fun, but framing this as some sort of historical preservation is kind of tenuous.

In 1920, there were 23,000 varieties of Apples in the U.S. On U.S.D.A. land, they grow less than 3,500. There are less than 7,600 in the world. The article is misleading. The claim is Mr Brown has rescued more than 1,200 varieties.

The ONLY variety of Apple native to the U.S. is the Crab Apple.

Apples are a $22B industry.

The Crab Apple you refer to is a species, not a variety. And, to be clear, while there were many, many varieties of apples named and propagated in North America in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, almost all of them were of the same, single species.

> An apple variety is only really rescued when it has found a home in commerce and some significant consumer base wants it.

This is such a sad viewpoint on the world when biodiversity is valued only if it is commercially exploitable. See other threads on what "home in commerce" really means: optimizing for transportability and uniformity at the expense of flavor and nutrition.

Late to the heirloom party, but this summer a friend offered me a cheese and tomato sandwich from her garden. I originally wasn't interested because tomatoes were always kinda meh for me. But after some encouragement I went for it and after the first bite, I realized I just never actually had a truly juicy and flavorful tomato in my life.

When you say something needs to be commercially successful to be viable, be careful what you're optimizing for. Our commercial agriculture systems don't always optimize for the things you're sold in the slick marketing commercials. There's alternative commerce systems out there, but they look like a farmer's market where you might be surprised by a variety you've never tasted before and might have a few blemishes rather than the scale of a national supermarket where both coasts and everyone in between always gets the same consistent but bland red delicious.

> When you say something needs to be commercially successful to be viable, be careful what you're optimizing for.

I'm optimizing for survival. If an apple variety has no market, it won't be eaten or enjoyed (so it becomes at best a museum accession), and in the longer term, it won't be grown, propagated or maintained, and because these things don't live forever, and don't propagate themselves, it will disappear. It doesn't have to have a huge market, it can be regional, or highly specialized; it can even be for nursery trees so people can try to grow it in their back yards. But just like anything that has to be produced (that is, that doesn't just persist on its own), it will disappear if no one is willing to pay for it to be produced.

So, I'm not making a value judgment about commercial vs other, I'm just saying what it takes to keep something alive.

It takes money to keep a variety alive, but commerce isn't the only source of money. A properly supported public collection, for example:

https://brogdalecollections.org/the-fruit-collection/

Saving heirloom apples has zero biodiversity value, or near two it. All domestic apples are extremely inbred and from a one or two cultivars brought to Europe a few hundred years back. The reservoir of apple biodiversity , at least for sylvestris is in its native range where domestic apple cultivation is actively polluting the genome. I think that's like khazakhastan and western china.

To add to this, any seeds from wild pollination will result in new 'varieties'.

It's trivial to regain diversity from this species, and it's not like apple is on the edge of survival.

To add to this, any seeds from wild pollination will result in new 'varieties'my

It's trivial to regain diversity from this species, and it's not like apple is on the edge of survival.

Common apple is still genetically very close to the true native species from Kazajahstan forests. This was a surprise for everybody.

There are other species from Japan to Siberia that can act as pollen donors.

Tomatoes are the extreme of what's better from a home garden.

Or as my former colleague put it: I didn't know I liked tomatoes until the first time I traveled to Europe.

Are apples one of those plants that require grafting to be true to type?

Yes.

This delicious fruit is just begging to be sued.

The red pippin apple looks amazing

Surely there oughta be better fruits to save. As a generic "fruit hunter" I hate all apples and oranges now, it's like there's no other fruit in the world. Go spread the seed of the ice cream bean fruit and tabo fruit instead.

This comment is as silly as saying you shouldn't grow walnuts because there is watermelon. The fruits you mentioned are not even comparable to apples they are tropical fruits and wouldn't even grow in most parts of the United States. Apples from the grocery store are generally lack-luster compared to varieties that have been grown for flavor instead of shelf life.

Apples have many more purposes than eating out of hand, this is why they are the world's most popular fruit. There are cider apples, pie apples and sauce apples. You can also make pectin, jam and apple butter. What else is done with ice cream bean besides just eating it?

Yup, for the first years of so I lived in the US, I never understood why American (hard) cider tastes so different from French cider, even when you get fancy no-sugar added cider.

The answer was that cider is mostly made from table apples instead of cider apples, and they taste completely different!

I've not had French cider, but cider is getting more popular here and there are quite a few styles available. One local cidery has a full range of ciders from sweet to dry and they use a variety of different cider apples. There are even a few cideries that are growing their own seedling apples to use in their cider blends.

I remember reading about someone whose passion (perhaps obsession) was rescuing stray dogs in a big city.

People would often ask him why he didn't apply that energy to the homeless. His response, roughly: why don't you? Dogs are his passion.

Volunteer for the activities you're passionate about. And stop sniping at people who are making the world a better place just because you think you know better than they do what's worth saving.

Those don't grow in temperate areas.

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